Love Shrewsbury Online Submission

Over the past year we’ve been repositioning the Love Shrewsbury website to become a content platform rather than just a blog. We’ve had a lot of success in this area forming partnerships with other local blogs and news site. Our platform is powering mobile phone apps such as InfoBeetle, providing news, offers & events data to their iPhone/Android applications and the Original Shrewsbury website.

This means that stories are getting greater distibution than they previously would, the additional coverage is great however we’ve been getting feedback that our authoring tools are not up to the standard of other sites.

Therefore this month we’ve taken a step forward by opening up our article submission process. The result is that you can submit content directly into our article queue. Content is moderated then set live just like any other story, it can then by distributed through our social media channels and content networks.

So why the change? Well previously it would be common to be sent a Word document attached in an email with the content of the article, we would then copy and pasting into the Love Shrewsbury website, at this point formatting would be lost and links/media removed. This was often a point of frustration and for many companies this workflow simply wasn’t working anymore, they wanted the ability to create visually stunning press releases using similar tools to what they would use for their own blog.

Secondly we want to encourage more users to submit content to the Love Shrewsbury site.

Given we have a very good online work flow for this it made sense to open up the process.